Critics of water boarding say that its results are not conclusive and don't prove guilt. This is due to an eventual degradation of the recipient's willpower, to the point where they're willing to say whatever the torturer wants to hear so they can gain a reprieve from their endless onslaught.
It's a criticism that can be levied at many torture tactics, but if that's the desired effect, none are as potent as watching "Grown Ups 2." Halfway through this thing, I was ready to admit guilt to any number of horrible atrocities, just so long as it meant the movie would end. Plainly put, this isn't just the most unfunny comedy of the year. It's one of the most unfunny comedies of all time.
While the first movie was certainly no gut buster, it at least had a script. It had a story for the characters to exist in and progress, even if minimally. Conversely, the sequel feels more like a sketch comedy show. It doesn't have a story so much as it does a series of random encounters that put our characters in allegedly goofy situations.
There are unconnected scenes that take place at a ballet recital where the beautiful, big breasted teacher overshadows the children on stage, a female aerobics class where the skeevy janitor pretends to be the instructor and gets the women to perform sexually suggestive maneuvers, a doctor's office where the "hilarious" payoff results in the doctor pulling out a flask from behind his lab coat, a finale where the old timers face off against an invading frat led by a character IMDB refers to as "Frat Boy Andy" (Taylor Lautner) and more. Quite literally, none of these scenes have anything to do with each other.
Continuing in the tradition of such lowbrow comedies as pretty much any Adam Sandler movie in the last five or six years, "Grown Ups 2" is riddled with potty humor so misguided and poorly delivered that it does a disservice to the values of actual excrement. The very first joke in the movie involves a deer urinating in Lenny's (Sandler) mouth and it's all downhill from there.
Simulated defecation while standing on a chocolate ice cream machine, actual defecation in a retail store toilet and "burp snarts" (when you start with a burp as a sneeze is coming out, which pushes out a subsequent fart) become the order of the day. And if you don't find burp snarts funny the first time, you won't the second time either. Or the third. Or fourth. Or fifth. Or when the film wraps itself up with one, the final joke in a movie so full of scatological humor like this that I wouldn't be surprised to hear the pages of the completed script were accidentally used as toilet paper and the filmmakers couldn't tell the difference.
When the film can't find an organic (used in every sense of the word) way to include a pee or poo joke, "Grown Ups 2" reverts to slapstick humor. If your idea of a good time comes from watching people fall over, get hit with any number of odd assortments, accidentally spray pepper spray in their faces and have their crotch eaten by a deer, then this is the movie for you.
In particular, Nick Swardson, playing a character imaginatively named Nick, exists solely to inflict harm upon. He takes so much abuse in this movie, I actually felt bad for him. His career has plummeted so far (if you can actually find a peak somewhere, that is), that he is relegated to a literal punching bag, the lowest point of a movie that already sinks so low it passes by the bottom of the barrel and digs a trench under it.
For every joke that delivers the mildest of chuckles (which would total, if my math is correct, one), there are about 150 that are so bad, they actually diminish your faith in humanity, especially if the crowd you're watching this abomination with is actually laughing. Frankly, if this is what we find funny, there's no hope for the future of American comedy. With a runtime of an hour and 40 minutes, "Grown Ups 2" is about an hour and 39 minutes too long and is an absolute embarrassment for all involved.